Originally SEO covered a lot of unknown territory and it was all experimental trial and error. We’d try everything, across many site, and hone in on what worked and eliminate what didn’t. There were many experiments and many failures. We would sometimes just wing it and hope for the best, always taking notes though and analyzing results over the months ahead. It was a crazy time and the work was nothing short of hectic. Clients thought it was all voodoo or smoke and mirrors and the engines, well, they caught on quickly to everything we had for ideas, and when we really got a piece of the puzzle in place. Time have sure changed and things are no where near clear still, but if anything has come to the forefront about SEO, it is that there are certain things that need to be done, and things to be had, like links, and that covers the whole gamut … soup to nuts!

Back when I started doing this optimization thing the term SEO, or optimization for that matter, wasn’t even known. At that point in time the engines utilized the meta tags to rank a site. The site that had the most repetitions of a keyword turned out to be the one who ranked #1 for it. It was crazy times. Google wasn’t even online yet. All you had to do to be the #1 listing was add keywords to your meta tags. It was an incredible easy time to make some money online.

After a while the engines started to become a little more sophisticated. The title tag was perhaps one of the first things that turned up as something you could do to help your sites’ listings beyond the meta tags. The engines had now realized that they needed to find other ways to figure out which site was the best out of what was there. The meta tags were simply abused to the max. These were very exciting times. The internet was growing in leaps and bounds and websites were cropping up by the thousands. Never has there been a more exciting time of life in recent history.

When it was realized the optimization of a site was required if you wanted to be a successful business the whole idea of SEO, or optimization, was just starting to take shape. Frankly, I had no idea what to do to approach these new requirements that the engines had, and of course, they didn’t let you know what they thought was important! Slowly, by trial and error and gains and losses, we all began to figure out which things we could do that would help a site. A lot of common sense went into all this research and trial and error. We also discovered things that we definitely did not want to do.

Times have changed and come full circle. It is no longer necessary to hire on high priced SEO consultants and gurus to get your site optimized. See, along the way over the past years everything that has to do with optimizing a website has come out into the open. Today you can learn how to optimize your own website, and do it well, all on your own. How you learn is up to you. You can frequent all of the blogs and forums and absorb everything that is being tossed about. You can also take a structured course in how to optimize your own site. Either way, today learning how to optimize a website is a simple matter of training yourself in SEO … and it is very possible for anyone to do themselves.

SEO has changed immensely over the years. Today it has become a standard part of web development, although don’t expect every designer to optimize your site as they build it … there still seems to be some block between SEO and web designers. Everything about SEO today however is more cut and dry than it has ever been. It’s a set of changes to make, a structured navigation system and site layout and then the acquisition of inbound links which should be thoroughly explained in any course, or any blog or forum, dedicated to optimization. You can learn how to do it yourself!

Robert (BK) Kelsey runs Ethical SEO Service and offers Ethical SEO Training as an affordable introduction to SEO (enough to optimize any website), as well as an Advanced SEO Training Course.

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